The Steve Colmus (and last!) Top 5

This is it, friends. Thanks for sticking with us, but it's time to put the Top 5 to rest for a little while. Maybe we'll be back with something new for you all to sound off on. Thanks to everyone who participated. I have some really great Top-5 playlists on my iPod now. And for better or worse, I feel like I know everyone here a little bit better.

Jenny-list greatness will be coming your way in my next post. Like I said, not sure what these other jokers are going to write about this week. We'll see! I just bought Junot Diaz's The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao today on the strong recommendations of Heather and Mike Gittings. Also picked up The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon, who's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, and Yiddish Policeman's Union have been recommending in this very blog. Should finish at least one on my trip to San Francisco this week, and I'm looking forward to whichever one I pick. And here goes Colmus...(editors note: Colmus has a potty mouth, if you are under 18 please send your permission slip to me via email to read this post):

I apologize to Adam for having taken so long pulling this together, but I was torn between contributing my Top Five Songs and mounting a defense of Jack Kerouac, because you all are some hatin’ ass fools. In the end, I decided against the Kerouac piece (for now) after being reminded of the old saying about how you can lead a horse to water, but he’s got to figure it the fuck out from there for his own damn self. Plus, after Ward and Myers’s Top Fives, I figured it might be nice to offer a man’s perspective.

These aren’t necessarily my Five Favorite Songs of All-Time, but they’re in the shooting match.

The Replacements “Bastards of Young”



This is what rock n’ roll should sound like - loud, sloppy and drunkenly heartfelt with a healthy dose of alienation. This is from their major label debut and it’s an amazing Statement of Purpose from a band who really couldn’t give a fuck about anything - record sales, being famous, even learning how to play their own songs. I love this recording because it’s warts-and-all - Westerberg can only barely sing the song, the solo two wheels it around the corners, and the whole thing feels like it could fly off the rails at every minute. In the end, it’s all held together by sheer excitement and force of childlike abandon - it sounds like the drunkest high school band in the world. It’s real, it’s honest, and it fucking rocks.

Supergrass “Alright”



One of my friends thinks that the indie rock of the 1990s will become the next Classic Rock when our generation is old and rich enough to afford our own radio stations. If so, this deserves to be in heavy rotation because this is about as perfect a pop song as anyone wrote in those years. This just feels like being 17 years old and careening through the streets in your friend’s car, trying to find something - or someone - to get into.

Bob Dylan “Mr. Tambourine Man”




I probably don’t need to explain this one. There are two dozen Dylan songs that could make this list, but I always come back to this - especially this version, from a concert on Halloween of 1964, before either he or the Byrds had released their takes of the song. The studio version is great enough, but this just seems to pour out of him effortlessly, in a gorgeously drowsy fashion. At the risk of sounding like some asshole Phish Phan, he really seems to climb inside the song on this. These are maybe my favorite lyrics of all-time, even if I really have no idea what he’s going on about. I think it’s an idealized peace the narrator is desperately in search of, where he can “forget about today until tomorrow.” Or it’s about smoking pot.

ABBA “Waterloo”



Someone who knows far more about the architecture of The Modern Pop Song than I, once told me that this is a mathematically perfect song - the first turnaround comes exactly one minute in, as prescribed; the second follows one minute and one second later; and then it’s all driven home with one last chorus, burying that hook in your brain. I hit things with sticks precisely so I don’t have to worry things like that, but I love this song simply because it always puts a smile on my face. Its so tight and perfectly arranged, and those crafty Swedes thought to compare an episode of romantic capitulation to Napoleon’s great defeat. SOLD! I really, really love the shit out of this.

Foreigner “Feels Like The First Time”



Bands don’t write shit like this anymore - tell me that chorus doesn’t have balls so big, they drag. It’s fucking enormous. For a long time, Foreigner was nothing more to me than the ironic soundtrack to my friends and mine’s illicit high school games of Risk in my parent’s basement, when we’d hide the beers under the bean bag chair and root through my Dad’s record collection. But I gradually realized that this song kicked so much ass that it almost made up for “I Wanna Know What Love Is.” When they launch out of the bridge and into the chorus around the 2:15 mark and Lou Grant is just riffing in and out of the backing vocals, it makes the hair on my ass stand up every time. You can scoff if you want to, but that probably just means you’re an asshole with no taste.

That’s enough out of me. I’ll re-introduce myself whenever I make the cut here again.